NEWS FEEDS

The RCJ provides RSS
feeds from well-respected news organizations, giving
our readers a convenient
portal through which to stay abreast of world
events and issues. Use the links provided. The
following are on the RCJ Front Page Report homepage
(scroll both columns to the right).

CCJ Publisher Rick Alan Rice dissects
the building of America in a trilogy of novels
collectively calledATWOOD. Book One explores
the development of the American West through the
lens of public policy, land planning, municipal
development, and governance as it played out in one
of the new counties of Kansas in the latter half of
the 19th Century. The novel focuses on the religious
and cultural traditions that imbued the American
Midwest with a special character that continues to
have a profound effect on American politics to this
day. Book One creates an understanding about
America's cultural foundations that is further
explored in books two and three that further trace
the historical-cultural-spiritual development of one
isolated county on the Great Plains that stands as
an icon in the development of a certain brand of
American character. That's the serious stuff viewed
from high altitude. The story itself gets down and
dirty with the supernatural, which inATWOOD
- A Toiler's Weird Odyssey of Deliveranceis the
outfall of misfires in human interactions, from the
monumental to the sublime.The
book features the epic poem"The
Toiler"as
well as artwork by New Mexico artist Richard
Padilla.

Elmore Leonard Meets Larry McMurtry

Western Crime Novel

I am
offering another novel through Amazon's Kindle
Direct Publishing service. Cooksin is the story of a criminal
syndicate that sets its sights on a ranching/farming
community in Weld County, Colorado, 1950. The
perpetrators of the criminal enterprise steal farm
equipment, slaughter cattle, and rob the personal
property of individuals whose assets have been
inventoried in advance and distributed through a
vast system of illegal commerce.

It is a ripping good
yarn, filled with suspense and intrigue. This was
designed intentionally to pay homage to the type of
creative works being produced in 1950, when the
story is set. Richard
Padilla has done his usually brilliant
work in capturing the look and feel of a certain
type of crime fiction being produced in that era.
The whole thing has the feel of those black & white
films you see on Turner Movie Classics, and the
writing will remind you a little of Elmore Leonard,
whose earliest works were westerns.
Use this link.

EXPLORE THE KINDLE
BOOK LIBRARY

If you have not explored the books
available from Amazon.com's Kindle Publishing
division you would do yourself a favor to do so. You
will find classic literature there, as well as tons
of privately published books of every kind. A lot of
it is awful, like a lot of traditionally published
books are awful, but some are truly classics. You
can get the entire collection of Shakespeare's works
for two bucks.

_______________

Back
in 1977, the Center for Environmental
Structure at the University of
California-Berkeley, published the second of
a three-volume series on "environmental
planning." It is a dandy of a textbook
titled A Pattern Language:
Towns, Buildings, Construction, and it
was written by a committee of academic
planners and architects consisting of
"Architect and Mathematician" Christopher
Alexander (pictured below on the cover of
Residential Architect magazine) and all the
other people listed there on the right.

Here is the way the
book is described at Amazon.com:
"...published... to provide a 'working
alternative to our present ideas about
architecture, building, and planning,' A
Pattern Language offers a practical
language for building and planning based on
natural considerations. The reader is given
an overview of some 250 patterns that are
the units of this language, each consisting
of a design problem, discussion,
illustration, and solution. By understanding
recurrent design problems in our
environment, readers can identify extant
patterns in their own design projects and
use these patterns to create a language of
their own..."

"My interest is in
buildings. And I'm a scientist insofar as I
try to understand what's going on in
buildings, in a reproducible, accurate
fashion, and try to tell the truth about it.
I'd say that the principal thing that has
helped me to thread my way through this
rather incredible briar patch is trying to
tell the truth about what is really going on
- when you're in a building, when you go
into a building, when you come out of a
building, when you use a building, when you
look at a building, when you look out the
window of the building, and so forth.

And I'd say that
the biggest problem with 20th century
architecture was that architects became
involved in a huge lie. Essentially what
happened at the beginning of the 20th
century was really a legacy of the 19th. New
forms of production began to be visible. And
in some fashion artists and architects were
invited to become front men for this very
serious economic and industrial
transformation.

I don't think they
knew what was happening. That is, I don't
think in most cases there was anything
cynical about this. But they were actually
in effect bought out. So that the heroes of,
let's say, the first half of the 20th
century - Le Corbusier, Mies Van Der Rohe,
Gropius even - a very nice man, by the way -
were brought on board in effect to say, OK,
here's all this stuff happening, what can
you do with it? Let's prove that it's really
a wonderful world we're going towards. And
instead of reflecting on questions about,
well, what was it that was going to be
wonderful about this world - from the very
beginning, the architects became visual
spokesmen, in a way to try to prove that
everything was really OK. Not only that it
was really OK, but somehow magic.

You know, there was
this phrase, elan vital, which was
bandied about a lot in the middle years of
the century, and in the early years of the
century as well - of, there's something
incredible happening here, we're part of it,
we're reaching forward. But all of this was
really image factory stuff. And what they
didn't know about the late 20th century was
only known to a few visionaries like Orwell
and others who could actually see really
what was going on.

I don't think this
is a very flattering view, and I suppose
architects would reject it, angrily. But I
do think it's true."

____________________________________

Thirty-one years
have passed since Alexander and his crew
published that landmark book, and in the
interview referenced above one can hardly
sense frustration in the great thinker
regarding how little it has all mattered.

The Center for
Environmental Structure has branched out to
have chapters throughout the world, and
Alexander has gone on to write other books
(e.g., Notes on the Synthesis of Form, A
City is Not A Tree, and The Nature of
Order) and become a "star" in his
rarified field of academia. In fact,
Alexander's centers have had what impact
they have had in the nether reaches of the
developing world, where things are built
from scratch and can most easily be matched
up with Alexander's concepts in planned
development. Central to that concept is the
idea of many small independently operating
central communities in which people live,
work and relate. Those are all primitive
designs to begin with, culled from a
retrospective view on English villages of
the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. They are
naturals for third world development and it
is heartening to imagine "invisible worlds"
out there on the global landscape being
developed in ways that sustain resources and
develop greater and more advanced senses of
local connectedness.

Do you see the
irony here? Alexander's
focus with A Pattern Language was to
create a framework for mounting arguments
against a tidal wave of corporate
intellectualism in which the focus was
on differentiating power, size, elitism,
exclusivity and, most of all, conspicuous
consumption. The academics never had a
chance against sex that charged.

I suppose you could
say that, maybe viewed from space, America
has developed along Alexander's
blueprint for urban growth but at a scale
that turns the advantages of regional
connectedness on its ear. They say "all
politics is local" and that's because all
economics is local, too.

Development in the
United States has been of a horizontal
nature, with cities spreading to suburbs
connecting to other suburbs and to other
cities, because there has been available
land that could be had for less than would
be required to build vertically within
established centers, not that his would have
been a great idea either.

Developments -
residential and commercial - are intensely
political things involving the approvals of
governmental and quasi-governmental
entities, and the machinations of
antagonistic competitors, interest groups,
and activist protesters. This ratio of
developers to stakeholders magnifies
dramatically in the most mature markets,
like the San Francisco Bay Area, so usually
it has been easier for deal makers to build
their developments along highway corridors
that connect their "projects" to important
commercial centers, in the process gaining
more attractive terms from county agencies
eager to boost the economies of their
outlying regions.

It has all made a
logical sort of sense, as long as "we" had
two critical resources in enviable
quantities: time and money. Time to
cover long commutes that add 5 to 15 hours
to the five-day work week, and money
to cover the costs of driving, parking and
maintaining your car.

Other than for the
obscenely wealthy, neither time nor money
are renewable in any guaranteed way. There,
in fact, is the rub: the desire to "develop"
one's way into the obscenely wealthy class,
thereby elevating into a reality in which
comfort renders common concerns more or less
trivial, drives ambition. This is the real
engine behind America's obsession with
"growth," the holiest grail among those
comprising the American Dream.

Developers and
planners in the United States, especially
over the past 60 years, haven't been
thinking much beyond the short term impacts
of a limited range of considerations, mostly
focusing on the benefits of increased
revenues, public and otherwise. What they haven't
focused on are the things that Alexander and
his cohorts have been emphasizing, which is
environmental sustainability in all
of its parts, including the quality of human
life. -
RAR

In
2008, a joint study of the Federal
Reserve's Community Affairs department
and the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program revealed that the
poverty profile in the U.S. has spread from concentrations in rural and
inner-city areas to include the nation's suburbs.

The report on the study was
released at the close of "Black Friday's" news day - "Black Friday"
being the day-after-Thanksgiving shopping day, the busiest single
shopping day of the year, when the nation's retailers take in 40 per
cent of their year's income and hope to move their accounts into
"black" ink.

The study was prepared for a
special meeting of the Fed to discuss the issue of "concentrated
poverty."

Traffic Study on Benicia, CA

Driving, Even Walking, Can Get
You Killed

The home town of the RARWRITER Publishing Group
offers some traffic engineering head scratchers that seem to get
people killed and injured at higher than average rates for
smaller California cities. As this brief video overview
demonstrates, it is as if traffic planners couldn't keep up with
the growth the city experienced since the 1970s, turning a
historic little town along the Carquinez Strait into a bustling
bedroom community, with commuter traffic dependencies. Somehow
city government didn't keep up.